DC Moore Gallery is proud to present Claire Sherman: New Pangaea, an exhibition of large-scale landscape paintings by Claire Sherman. Sherman’s current works represent the natural world in a manner that makes her landscapes both recognizable and utterly imaginative, inviting yet daunting. The distorted palette of deep blues and greens creates an enhanced vividness that is in tension with the dense mesh of branches broken and askew, and leaves and plants twisted and overgrown. Independent curator Melissa Messina describes Sherman’s paintings as, “vast entanglements, synthesized mixes of plant life and geographical phenomena that in their detail maintain a sense of specificity but in combination intentionally do not scribe an exact location. They are every place at once or no place at all.”

The exhibition’s title comes from the writings of environmental author Elizabeth Kolbert who has described the consequences of global travel and trade as “reshuffling of the biosphere that is bringing all of the worlds flora and fauna together,” thereby creating another super-continent, New Pangaea. Sherman both witnesses and explores extremes of climate change and the effects of invasive species crowding out native ones. There is a cycle of invasiveness, chaos, and growth, ever present in the paintings, as seen by nature’s tangled, undulating forms that flow off the canvas, and the roaring waterfalls that come crashing towards the viewer. The idea of a new environmental order, beautiful yet ominous, has become central to Sherman’s body of work.